Remembering God’s Future
Artwork: “Model of a City” By Carlo Crivelli, 1482
I have long withdrawn from the daily news cycle, not because I am not interested but because it is disillusioning, relentless, and too much. But while I have withdrawn from the news cycle I have still been stunned. I find myself speechless, sad, and feeling powerless. It’s not that I don’t have reason to feel that way but if that is my primary disposition I look at the wrong things.
That I have been so stunned has to do with the fact that I have been relatively sheltered (compared to people who live in other times and places), and that I have believed the world to be more enlightened than it is. The lies we like to tell ourselves. That I have been sheltered is true, and my presumption about the world shows that even those who believed they had not bought into the paradigm of progress can fall for it.
Worship is central to the life of the Church and one of its primary purposes is to draw my gaze away from my own assumptions, my fears, and even my own aspirations to the God who made heaven and earth, who called a people, who came among us, who grafted us to God’s people Israel, and who in Christ is making all things new. We receive these promises in Word and Sacrament, and through the voices and lives of our siblings in Christ.
Some of the apathy of Christians in relation to their stance toward the world comes from the discouragement described above, and from a faith that has privatized God’s promises, as if we had no reason to hope, or if our hope was only to be whisked away to heaven.
Yet the promise of Revelation 21 and 22 is for the world to be made new, for the garden to be restored, for the fruits of the tree to bring healing, and for God to dwell with us. It is a vision that leaves room neither for resignation nor withdrawal into a personal and private salvation.
Both Revelation and the Book of Acts are texts that are full of visions; visions that direct the focus and actions of the apostles and of the Church from terror to salvation, and from despair to hope.
In Acts it is a vision that moves Paul and his companions to set out to a new continent. It is a man who appears in a vision, it is women they come upon. Borders are crossed, boundaries broken, male and female roles redefined, and outsiders included. Through the Holy Spirit and Paul’s preaching Lydia catches a glimpse of that vision, and her invitation to Paul, Silas, and Timothy is a repurposing of her property for the sake of the Gospel. A few verses later Paul and his companions encounter an unnamed slave girl who had a spirit of divination. Willie James Jennings observes that in her possession we see how the demonic and the economic can be bound together.¹ By the power of God Paul sets her free, and sets free her voice.
Paul and the others in the Book of Acts did not know the Book of Revelation, yet their lives are drawn by the promises made there, by the God revealed in the Lamb. In 2 Corinthians Paul writes, “We are treated as imposters, and yet are true; as unknown, and yet are well known; as dying, and see – we are alive; as punished, and yet not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything.” It is not that there is nothing that could discourage them, but those are not the things that direct their lives.
This brings to mind a verse by the 18th century Protestant mystic Gerhard Tersteegen:
Light of light eternal,
All things penetrating,
For your rays our soul is waiting.
As the tender flowers,
Willingly unfolding,
To the sun their faces holding:
Even so
Would we do,
Light from you obtaining,
Strength to serve you gaining.Flowers turn their heads toward the sun and that is the direction into which Tersteegen is pointing us, so that our lives may unfold, unfold through the gifts received by the grace of God.
Revelation 21 tells us that the new Jerusalem is coming to us, that God comes to dwell with us, and the vision of today’s reading from chapter 22 shows us that glorious vision. In all this we see a God who takes the initiative, we see the God who comes. That God comes is not reason for apathy but is encouragement to be God’s witnesses, to speak of and embody God’s coming reign, and thereby to disavow loyalty to whatever idols seek our allegiance (such as fear or private salvation).
Since the beginning, this has been at the centre of who we are. But as with all things that are true, we need to remind each other, and for this God has given us the community of the Church (see John 14:26).
Willie James Jennings, Acts, page 160.